


Water In The Desert

by toothybeastie



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Cannibalism, Cannibalistic Thoughts, Dysfunctional Family, Family Drama, Family Feels, Gen, Intrigue, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Motherhood, No Romance, Novella, Nuclear Weapons, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Romance, Relationship(s), Survival, Unofficial Sequel, a story about new characters in the same universe, basically nasty stuff happens in the wasteland, canon character mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 18:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4069975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toothybeastie/pseuds/toothybeastie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After her mother the Dag's death, Milkweed left the Citadel to find her own way in the wasteland...and to find Imperator Furiosa, who hasn't been seen for years. However, nothing ever goes according to plan. The wastes are a dangerous place, but she hardly expected to encounter a man with a strange set of tattoos covering his arm, tattoos that a whole legion of people seem willing to kill for. She soon finds herself in the midst of a war, the stakes of which could mean control of the entire wasteland...or destruction of everything her mother and Furiosa worked so hard to gain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

 

***

 

Prologue

 

***

_My ma used to tell me, when I was small and my hair was still good and long for combing, ‘bout how she flew and fought on the fury road. I was no more than a chit in her belly, those days; no brain to remember, not even an excuse to say I did. I liked to think I had a part in it though. That through her fighting blood running down her veins and into me I was made strong, I was made historic on that day of all historic days._

_Remember me._

_She told me more than that, as I grew old and useful. Guided my hands into damp dirt, ‘round the roots of little plants so they wouldn’t break when I moved them. They were fine as hairs on my fingers. Some kinds killed; others soothed my lungs, made my lowest days a little sweeter._

_She’d show me, too, the patterns the stars made, and the kind of deep hush across the wasteland, the kind that settled after a long, hot day, the kind that tastes blue on the tongue and sad in the soul. On top of the red-rock-height of the Citadel weren’t nothing to break the view of the stars but my own nose in front of me, and my ma’s hands when she lifted them to point out little glims and glits of light._

_“Those are far away,” she said. “More distance than you can fathom, little weed. And you’d best be glad they’re not closer, too.”_

_“Why, ma?”_

_“They’re big balls of fire. And they’d eat up the world if they came too close. Eat it up with heat ‘til there wasn’t anything left.”_

_“They wouldn’t. There’s nothing to eat out there, anyway. Nothing but dirt.”_

_She’d laugh in her moon-headed way and stick her fingers in my hair and ruffle it til it was all flying like feathers. She was tall and pale and beautiful, my ma, with her hair long and white around her, even when she was young. I always thought she might be what some in the wasteland called a snakeye. Able to see more than what was in front of her. She could see how things would grow sure enough, and could see how people ailed even before cracking them open._

_Remember me._

_She called me Milkweed. I was her girl, her only girl; she didn’t cotton to any men, not even the ones who were nice to her. She didn’t cotton to many save her sisters-in-heart, save to Furiosa, she of the iron-grey hair and iron-grey arm. They ran the Citadel, the walled city where I grew, a paradise in the middle of the red desert: three rock spires surrounded by the lush garden my ma and aunts and all had worked so hard to steal and keep and grow._

_“To think of change? Simple,” Ma told me. “To change? Nothing harder.”_

_They taught me as I grew, them and the rest of the Citadel folk, raised me as daughter of dozens; maybe so they’d forget who gave me my genes in the first place. Furiosa never forgot, I think. Oh, she was kind, in her way, but who could forget a beast like the one who hacked the deathshead into the Citadel?_

_I could still hear him breathing sometimes. In my head, in nightmares. Deep in the wending halls. They called him immortal, and what’s called immortal can never die, not really. Maybe he was still there, kept alive by me, kept alive by the wasting rattle in my lungs._

_No one told me out. But I knew what I was. I knew what had wrought me._

_I had to become strong. Strong, like my mother’s blood. I knew it was destiny manifest. All I had to do was follow._

_Toast the Knowing, with her gunpowder-scarred fingers and her eyes glinting hawkish in the sunlight, showed me the ways of the rifle. The way to find a man’s skull with my bullet, the way to brace for the recoil, the way to taste at the wind so I’d know how my shot might curve. “More than seeing,” she said to me. “It’s all calculations. It’s power, too, same as fist-to-the-face can be.” She chewed her pick and grinned. “Better, I think. Go on. You try.”_

_“I can’t. I’m…I can’t hold the gun.”_

_“Yeah, you can.” She swapped out hers for a smaller one, a lighter one. Less power, but greater range. Compromise. “Try that.”_

_I am a warlord’s daughter and a snakeye’s, too._

_“Remember me,” Ma whispered, as a night fever took her off._

_Remember me._ _The words carved into the balcony, the stone-hacked overlook where the water levers live. Furiosa put them there so we’d learn the Citadel wasn’t to be a place of pain, no longer. A place of hope, she told us._

_I haven’t seen that green and growing place for a long, long time. Not since Furiosa walked into the wastes with naught but a single engine and a tank of guzzoline to keep her running. Not since I knew I had to follow._

_You make your own way in this world._

_I’ve seen wars and growing things and dead things and skies so big I could drown in them. I’ve seen the ghosts of men in bodies still breathing. I’ve seen Old Walker himself and lived to rasp the tale._

_I’ve killed and near been killed in stride. Fair, I think. That’s the way the world turns. In the end, you get what you gave, and you’d best remember your debts._

_Remember me._

_Remember me._

_Remember._


	2. A Pack Of Dingoes

 

            Milkweed crouched behind the rock and listened to the echo of engines across the sand. The sound was like thunder, a faint ringing aftershock, panging across her fine-tuned senses as the wind gusted toward her.

To her back were cliffs, a few hundred meters south, but ahead was the full dry sweep of the wastes, red sand and crags of red stone stuck like teeth through the dirt. Curtains of sand rippled across the desert, scattered with the wind, across the pale sky.

            “Shit,” she whispered. She craned her head around the rock and peered through her scarred goggles toward the source of the sound. In the distance, she could make out a plume of sand and the beetle-shapes of at least a half dozen vehicles, moving fast in her general direction. Most of them clustered V-form around another, a smaller one speeding away, as if trying to escape the others’ jaws.

            _Raiders,_ she thought. _Dingoes, most likely._ Desert thieves were common, almost as common as folk like her, lone wanderers picking their way across the wastes in search of supply and whatever fortune fell them. Usually, sighting raiders, she ducked her head and scurried past, but they were close. Damnably close. They’d snuck up on her; the wind and the coming sandstorm and the dampening cliffs had obscured their sound and plume until it’d been too late. Now, they headed straight for her.

            The roar of engines pitched louder, edged with a high shriek like a kid’s scream. Milkweed gripped her rifle, her pulse ticking in her throat. _Let’s not get caught and eaten today,_ she thought, and slung its strap over her shoulder. She pushed away from the rock and clambered away, darting through the sand, her beat-up gear blending decent with her surroundings. Her ammo jingled in her belt, her pack bouncing heavy against her spine. She made it to the next rock just as the first car howled past in a rage of hot metal and roaring engine.

            Milkweed spun and crouched and gripped at the rock, her eyes wide behind her goggles, her teeth champed tight. The car skidded, whirled in a fan of sand and dust, tires spinning and catching; Milkweed caught a glimpse of a rust-scaled cab, exterior pitted and flaming, engine block exposed as if by some awful blow, before the car slammed side-first into the rock she’d just been crouching behind and flipped.

            The sound was like hell; Milkweed ducked away and clamped her hands over both sides of her head, but she couldn’t block out the tear and screech of rending metal, the crack of the vehicle’s suspension, and the _WHUMPH_ of fire catching. She heard a yell over all that, a human howl worse than the dying car.

The drone of other engines came closer, closer, and the whoops and yips of the encroaching raiders. On the lead car, a low-slung thing with elegant wheel-guards, an animal skin snapped and pulled on a flagpole stuck to the front of the engine block.

            _Dingoes indeed,_ Milkweed thought. More than raiders. Cannibals, skinners, animals wearing human faces. Fear flashed through her, and she spun back to face the wreck. Flame licked it, a black, oily billow of smoke and orange fire. The heat singed at her skin, even through her head wrap. The Dingoes’ cars hazed closer, ghosts through the sand. Milkweed made out the faint struggle of the crashed car’s driver.

            She glanced behind her. The way to the cliffs was clear; she could be out of there and in the shadows while the Dingoes skinned and gutted their prey. They’d be none the wiser.

            _Remember me,_ her ma whispered, in her head.

            _“Shit,”_ she said again. Then she darted out of her hiding place and toward the inferno.

            The heat blasted her; her goggles instantly steamed up. She pushed them up from her face and squinted, her eyes going dry, her face ablaze. She thought she could smell burned hair; all she saw was the black writhe of smoke, the spilling fuel, the mangle of metal. Blood dripped from the crunched window. A hand gripped weakly at the frame.

            A howl pierced the air.

            Milkweed dropped to her knees and pawed at the sand around the window. Inside, the driver curled, broken-looking, bloodied. “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey! You alive? You breathing?”

            _“Ughhh…”_

            “You need to get out! Dingoes are coming!”

            “I…can’t…” He stirred. His head lifted, then dropped again; the pelt around his shoulders shivered. “My leg. My leg won’t move.”

            “Fuck,” spat Milkweed. She glanced round at the Dingoes, then reached inside and grabbed both the driver’s shoulders. “You need to help me. You need to help me or we’ll both die-”

            Another howl. Milkweed dropped him and unslung her rifle and whirled. The lead vehicle was close, too close; she could make out the face of the driver, grinning, the lower half of her face painted red. Animal teeth made a jagged headdress around her scalp. More Dingoes, all with the red jaws, hung off the back of the car. Milkweed didn’t need to look too close to see their weapons- machetes and axes and knives, all the better for peeling people. With a yell, Milkweed brought up her gun and fired. Her first bullet cracked off the windscreen; the driver’s face twisted into a snarl, and she jerked her car to the side.

Milkweed fired again. Blood burst behind the head of the lancer in the passenger seat; he slumped and fell, right under the car’s back wheels.

“Come on,” Milkweed whispered, to her gun, to her eyes. “Come on.” She fired again. The tire burst with an explosive _BANG._  The vehicle veered and careened off, leaving a red streak in the sand behind it.

            She turned and grabbed the man’s shoulders again. He gasped in pain as his broken leg caught around the edge of the seat. Milkweed didn’t stop. She heaved at him, her teeth grit; his shoulders slumped onto sand. His hands twitched. Milkweed pulled again, sliding him out and onto the ground.

            “Get up!” she yelled, into his face. Half of him was crusted in drying blood. _“Get up!”_

            She curled her arms around his shoulders and dragged him to his knees. He wrenched away from her, panting, his broken leg twisted underneath him. Milkweed could see the jagged, yellow-pink edge of bone sticking out.

            _You probably just dealt your own death for a man who’ll just as soon die from infection,_ she thought. Too damn late now.

“We’re going!” she snarled at him, and pulled him as hard as she could, away from his wreck. A tank of guzzoline glugged its contents onto the dirt in her path; behind her, the Dingoes’ sighting howls pitched up to a feverish keen. As she dragged her sun-addled charge, she kicked the tank into the fire and threw herself and the man behind a jut of rock.

The explosion lit the sky bloody around them. Pressure slammed against the back of the rock; hot wind scoured past Milkweed’s face. Fire lashed at the air as burning shrapnel spackled the sand around her. She heard the screech of brakes, screams as the Dingoes’ car caught, too, far too near the blast to veer. The smell of cooked flesh wafted through the wind toward her. Despite herself, her mouth watered. The hungry pit in her stomach pulled.

For a moment, she wavered, hunger blurring her senses. She put her hand to the hilt of her belt knife. Carved away from bone, meat was meat. No one’d question it, hot and good on the teeth…

She took her hand away from her knife.

 _Not yet mad enough to consider that,_ Milkweed told herself.She pulled the wounded man to his foot, and, ungainly, they hopped-ran-stumbled away from the wreckage, away from the last howls, the moans and groans of dying Dingoes, dying men as they bled out under the sun.

 


	3. Two Missing Fingers

A cave mouth gaped in the cliff wall. From the outside, it looked barely more than a fold in the rock, a shadow cast by the lowering sun. When Milkweed peered further, though, she found it went deeper, wending a few meters back into cool darkness. She heard the drip of water from within, and when she touched the cave wall with a strip-gloved hand, found them damp.

            “It’ll do,” she said, to the man. She glanced sideways. He was unconscious, or about so; his eyelids fluttered, and though he was still moving, it was only just. He slumped at her shoulder, all dead weight. He’d really be dead weight, too, if she didn’t get a good look at his leg, set his bone right. Infection would take him fast out here, if raiders or muties didn’t find them first.

            Milkweed moved into the cave, dragging her companion behind her. “You’re a quiet one,” she said. “I like ‘em quiet.” She hauled him back and back, across the irregular footing, until the cave bent and she could no longer see the entrance- and anyone passing by could no longer see them.

She dropped the man, and he fell with a heavy thud to the rock. His head slumped down, showing a mess of silver-white hair. His face didn’t look so old, though; maybe mid-twenties, past the scarring. Probably done some deeds, seen some deeds, and his scalp showed the stress. Lots of folks got older than their years, out here.

“Hey, fellow,” Milkweed said.

He didn’t move.

“You alive?”

He didn’t even twitch. She pressed her fingers to his neck. A pulse beat steady. Good, good. He breathed, too, nice and deep.

Milkweed slung off her pack and set it down, then pulled up her goggles and headscarf. Her springy sand-brown hair with its stripe of blonde sprang out in mad profusion. She smoothed it back with both hands, then crouched and pulled the man’s broken leg straight.

His face tensed in pain, brows drawing together. Milkweed froze, watching him in case he was about to attack. He wore dark-red leathers, all beat-up and torn, and the pelt of some animal across his shoulders. His hands were wrapped in rusty bandages, nails black with grime and engine grease; two fingers on his left hand were gone, pinky and ring, chopped at the base. Tats covered the rest of his hand and up his arm, visible through the tears. Words and numbers, mostly.

Milkweed tilted her head, trying to read them. _797001,_ read one finger. _BETA 17763,_ said his hand. Above that: _COYOTE 7787._ And so on, and on, crabbed so tight together that she could scarce read them in places. They didn’t make a lick of sense. Maybe he’d done them himself, in a mooncalf fit. Maybe they were slave marks. Milkweed’s ma had had a slave mark; a lot of folk at the Citadel did.

“Who’s…who’s that?”

Milkweed looked up. The man’s eyes were open.

She scrambled back; her hand went to the hilt of her knife. She whipped it out. The faint light caught its edge and gleamed.

“Stay there,” Milkweed said. “Move and you’re skewered.”

He raised his hand. It shuddered, his three remaining fingers twitching with fatigue. “I…I’m not gonna…do anything. I…my leg hurts. Why the hell’s it hurt so much?”

“You got in a crash, mister,” Milkweed said. “You got banged up.” She pointed to the spike of glistening bone. “You got a bit of tibia there wants to say hello.”

The man’s face blanched. “You’ve got to help me. You got me here-”

“Yeah. Sure. First thing- how’d you run afoul of those Dingoes? Everyone knows you shouldn’t drive in this area. They’ll snap you for sure.”

He shook his head slowly and sank back down against the rock. He had a pale, fragile face, bruised under the eyes and around the jaw; under the bloodied leather outfit he looked bony, like it’d been a while since he’d eaten anything.

“I was trying to get away,” he murmured.

“Yeah, and?”

He shook his head.

“Fine,” Milkweed said. She slid her knife back in its sheath and leaned against the other wall of the cave. “We’ll just sit here. How’s your leg? Hurts, doesn’t it? It’ll hurt worse once the pus starts seeping in. Ever had a wound go septic? Like the flesh just turns right to mud and trickles off the bone-”

“I don’t know why!” the man said. His face blanched even whiter; his shaking hands clenched at his thigh. He stayed like that, rigid, for a moment.

“I just,” he went on, more quietly, “I dunno. My head. It’s all mixy and raw and weird. Hurts.”

“You forgot why.”

“Yes.”

“That sounds awful suspicious from my angle. You a thief?”

“No.”

“Slave?”

“I…don’t think so.”

“Criminal?”

“Like I said, I don’t know. I remember you dragging me loose. And I remember this.” He looked up at her, his eyes wide in his bruised-up face. “That’s all.”

Milkweed sighed. She crossed her arms and gestured with her toe. “So you’ve no notion what those tattoos mean.”

He looked at his arm, then peeled up the bloodied bandages to expose more of it. The inked numbers and letters stood out starker against the clean flesh under his sleeve, perfect rows of them, tattooed there as if by a machine. “No,” the man said. “No. I don’t…I don’t know.”

“Good thing I came along,” Milkweed said. “You’d have been skinned and eaten by those Dingoes.” She knelt, still cautious, and reached for her pack. “I’m gonna take a look at this leg. It’ll hurt, but I know my way around bones well enough. You game?”

The man nodded.

“What’s your name? In case you die of shock and I need to make you a tombstone.”

He said nothing.

“Do you not remember that, either?”

“It’s Aster,” said the man.

Milkweed sniffed. “Heh,” she said. “That’s sort of a plant. And my name’s a plant. I guess we’ll get along okay, then.”

He nodded again and leaned his head back. His face was sheened in sweat. Milkweed noted this with a niggle of worry. If he did go into shock, she wasn’t sure she was equipped to deal. She barely had enough water to get her to the next town, and by the looks of him he didn’t have much to his name but his clothes and a whole pack full of uselessness.

She rummaged through her pack for a set of scissors, for water and rubbing alcohol and boiled bandages, wrapped up tight. She set the scissors above his boot and began to cut away at the tough leather. It peeled back, exposing his leg, already bruised an ugly purple-red from the break. The bone stuck from it, blood sluicing down around the exposed shard. The smell was raw and yolky, meaty from the muscle. No scent of infection yet.

Milkweed chewed at her lip.

_Ma,_ she thought. _What’d you do?_

Pointless, pointless. Ma was dead and given away to the vultures. She’d know what to do, though: how to slit open this man’s leg and slide the bone back into place. Milkweed didn’t have the stuff for that. She didn’t have any of it: supplies or know-how.

“Look,” she said, quietly. “I’m gonna clean it, okay?”

“It’s bad,” Aster said. “Isn’t it.”

“It’s not good.” She wet a bandage with the alcohol. The smell stung at her eyes and cleared a little bit of the blood reek from her head. She pressed the pad to the wound.

Aster stifled a cry with his knuckles. Milkweed felt his leg tense, the strain of keeping himself from screaming out obvious.

She took the pad away and scrubbed her wrist across her forehead. “I know some doctoring, but…this is above a bit of wasteland first aid. I’m gonna have to take you somewhere. To the nearest town, wherever that is.”

“You…you don’t know?”

“I’ve never been this far northeast.”

“There’s a settlement called Broketop a few kilometers that way.” He gestured to the vague west. “Against the mountains…near a natural well. Extends deep, deep underground. I heard…I heard its master made it from whatever used to be there. Some kind of…vault or something. It’s meant to be impregnable.”

“Yeah, lots of people say that right before they get invaded,” Milkweed said. “They friendly?”

“If you’ve got stuff to trade or skills, then they won’t shoot.”

Milkweed nodded. “Better than nothing.” She sighed. “Your damn leg, though. Shame your wheels got busted.”

“They won’t let you in,” Aster said. His eyes fluttered shut.

“Huh?”

“If you were thinking of leaving me. They won’t let you in. Not without my skill level.” His mouth fluttered in an anemic smile. “I’m a rarity.”

“What’re you on about, mooncalf?”

His eyes opened again, wide and dark in the shadows. “Your name,” he said. His voice came hoarse, scarce more than a whisper. Something about it sent sand sliding down Milkweed’s spine. She thought of snakes and wasps’ nests, of things best left in the dark.

“Your name,” he repeated, still staring at the cave roof. “Milkweed. Little straggler, little stray. Grew where no one wanted you, in your mam’s belly; thought of cutting you off, she did; no, no, no; spare the child, might be a girl. Spare the girl…”

Milkweed watched him. Her mouth had gone dry. She felt the weight of her rifle at her back, the dry tack of his blood on her fingers.

“Ooooh, but your lungs do burn come night,” Aster whispered. “The old man’s plague growing strong. Can’t kill a god. Maybe you wish your mother had thought different. Maybe you wish your blood had gone cold before you ever knew whose daughter you truly would grow to be-”

“Snakeye,” snarled Milkweed. Aster blinked, and something seemed to snap. His eyes flicked to her. “You’re a snakeye.” She rose, unsteady, to her feet. Her hands shook, and she tensed them, hoping they’d still. Praying. She tasted acid in the back of her throat. “That’s your talent, hm? Picking about in people’s heads? Well.”

She stepped closer and pressed her boot toe against Aster’s broken leg. He gasped in pain.

“Stay out of mine,” Milkweed spat.

She drew back and tugged her headwrap and goggles over her face. “I’m gonna go and take a look ‘round the wreckage,” she said. “See if the Dingoes have gone. Maybe salvage an engine…”

“Milkweed,” Aster said. “I’m sorry.”

His voice was no longer dry and whispering. Still, Milkweed felt a curl of rage, pressure in her throat. She didn’t think she could stay without doing something dire.

“Just keep quiet,” she told him, then hefted her rifle and her canteen and ducked toward the cave mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things start thickening...mysterious! 
> 
> R&R is always appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> Thought I'd try writing something in the spirit of the movies- lone wanderer encounters problem in the wasteland and has to help fix it. This is definitely an adventure story, but I'll see how it grows and where it goes and all!


End file.
